Changes underway
at Pueblo’s Chieftain

You may have noticed something different about our Sports section lately: significantly more local sports coverage.

There is a lot more to come.

The ownership and management of The Chieftain understands how significant local sports coverage — high schools and the university — is to you, our readers. Families live here for generations. That means they follow their alma maters; they are interested in how their children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews, and relatives of their friends are doing in local athletic competition.

Over the past few years, frankly, we’ve struggled to keep up with the explosion of local sports. We now have nine Pueblo County high schools that compete in numerous sports. This fall alone, there are more than 40 local high school teams competing, sometimes twice a week.

And the university athletics department has taken off, led by its national title-contending football team.

To bring you the sports coverage that you’ve come to expect from The Chieftain for generations, we’ve expanded our sports department by two full-time reporters, and we will be devoting more news space to our sports coverage.

Sports Editor Joe Cervi will fill you in on the details in his column today in the Sports section.

This is only part of the many improvements we are working on to continue our quest to be your No. 1 choice for news in Pueblo and Southern Colorado.

Earlier this year, we launched special regional coverage pages in the Wednesday, Thursday and Friday editions. Our region, stretching from Pueblo to the Kansas border to Raton, N.M., to South Fork, is an area rich in history and culture. It also is a region where communities are changing. We have made a commitment to cover our region, and we hope you have enjoyed the colorful stories as much as we have.

We also are beefing up our local reporting, taking on more and more tough issues and freeing up reporters and even editors to spend the time and resources necessary to bring you comprehensive and investigative stories — in a level of detail that no other local news outlet can provide. The recent coverage of what one pundit called Emailgate — the controversy involving a county official and some council members — illustrates the kind of comprehensive, local, investigative reporting that no one can do like The Chieftain.

There also are many internal things that you won’t see, things that happen behind the scenes that already are showing improvements in our daily product. A few examples:

We constantly review each day’s edition, praising our successes, discussing different ways of how we could have done some things, plan on how to follow up on stories and learning from our mistakes. Three times every day, we formally review the day’s edition with all newsroom staff members, as well as upper management and ownership.

We also are forming more internal quality programs, such as a layout style committee so that the look of our paper is more consistent.

More changes lie ahead. We plan to add more business news coverage, for example, to keep up with the many changes in our community such as new businesses coming to Pueblo and existing businesses expanding their operations.

You may disagree, but we feel that something is happening in Pueblo. There is a positive energy that perhaps wasn’t here a few years ago. Take a walk along the Historic Arkansas Riverwalk of Pueblo and think about what that area looked like years ago. Our freeway through town is about to be rebuilt, and that will enhance the community’s appearance. Our community college and university continue to grow in reputation, and the campuses are beautiful.

We are excited about these and many other changes and we are excited about the investments and other changes we’re making at The Chieftain so we can better keep you abreast of what’s going on in our community and, maybe most importantly, to understand what is going on in our community.

Thank you for reading The Chieftain. We hope you enjoy the improvements in your newspaper that are underway.